The media’s ever-changing economic narrative shifted again last week, moving away from a reviled insurance company toward a beleaguered Obama Administration official.

With Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner unveiling a financial sector rescue package and calling for stricter regulation, the economic crisis was once again overwhelmingly the top story last week. It filled 41% of the newshole from March 23-29 as measured by the Pew Research Center’s Project in Excellence. While that represented a drop from the previous week’s coverage (53%), it is in line with the overall level of attention to the crisis (43%) in the two months since Barack Obama was inaugurated. The No. 2 story last week, concerns over Mexican drug smuggling, was about one-seventh as big as the economy.

Geithner’s proposal to clean up the so-called “toxic assets” made him the week’s second-biggest newsmaker, behind only Obama. At a time when public perception and confidence can have a significant impact on the economy, the Treasury Secretary was looking for what golfers call a mulligan—or in more common parlance, a do-over. Back on February 10, when he first outlined a financial sector bailout proposal, Geithner was widely panned for poor presentation, criticized for a lack of specifics and blamed for a 382-point drop in the Dow that day. (“Geithner Plan Lacks Freshness and Clarity,” declared the Washington Post headline that pretty much summed up the coverage.)

Geithner’s March 23 proposal generated a warmer reception, particularly on Wall Street where the Dow shot up 497 points. “This Time, Geithner’s Plan for Banks Makes Sense,” declared the headline on business writer Joe Nocera’s New York Times column. Praise was far from unanimous, though, and a Congressional hearing held during the week kept some of the focus on AIG.

The Chevrolet Volt may wow the media when it arrives in dealerships next year, but the Obama administration believes the plug-in electric car will cost too much and won’t attract enough buyers.

“While the Volt holds promise, it will likely be too expensive to be commercially successful in the short-term,” the administration said in its evaluation of General Motors Corp.’s restructuring plan. The car “is currently projected to be much more expensive than its gasoline-fueled peers and will likely need substantial reductions in manufacturing cost in order to become commercially viable.”

The analysis was a significant blow to GM. Since the vehicle’s unveiling at the 2007 Detroit auto show, the Volt has helped GM reshape its image as a more environmentally conscious company. GM parlayed the Volt into massive media coverage and has invested heavily in the program…

The government audit of GM’s restructuring plan suggested the carmaker had invested too much time developing the Volt to leap frog Toyota’s lead in green technologies.